Attitudes to Religion, Education, and Status in Worker Settlements: The Architectural and Archaeological Evidence from Wales

Abstract

The main detailed study area studied for the present chapter is within western Britain and relates to the nation of Wales and largely to parts of the south Wales coalfield which became the largest in Britain in the early twentieth century and the largest exporting coalfield internationally . However, the main period of study is in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries when that coalfield sustained the largest complexes of ironworks, and of copperworks, in the world.

Keywords

Nineteenth Century Early Nineteenth Century South Walis Common Land World Centre

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Notes

Acknowledgments

Much of the information for this chapter is informed from work undertaken on the industrial settlements of the lower Swansea Valley for the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales, reprinted as Copperopolis in 2005 (see http://www.rcahmw.gov.uk). The work on nonconformist chapels owes much to my colleagues on the chapels project, David Percival, Olwen Jenkins, Penny Icke, Geoff Ward, and to John Davies. My former colleague Olwen Jenkins also carried out a detailed study of the remaining Blaenavon settlement. Detailed information on sites and buildings in Wales is available on the online Coflein database of the Royal Commission at http://www.coflein.gov.uk. Much of the European context of this chapter is drawn from sites explained by colleagues present at successive meetings of TICCIH. Professor Louis Bergeron’s is an additional study of international worker settlements that can be found in the “Studies for the World Heritage” section on the ICOMOS website at http://www.icomos.org

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